An hour of my Saturday afternoon was given over to
attending a concert of new music by student composers. It is cause for celebration that student composers
in Singapore not only have a forum in which they can try out their ideas and
begin to have their embryonic creative voices heard in public, but also that
there is an audience – and not just an audience of their peers and professors –
who are willing to come, hear and react to what they hear.
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| Could a Grade 5 Candidate know what to do with this? |
It is also a cause for celebration that their youthful
experiments in musical creativity are taken seriously by performers, and that
those performers are not just committed to playing these works, but are willing
to have their techniques stretched in order to do so. The two-way traffic between composer and
performer is vital for the evolution of new music, and this concert (and the
many others like it) offered a matchless opportunity for productive interaction
and collaborative learning.
Hopefully, the students whose works were aired in this
concert will have learnt from the experience.
They will have heard what their ideas sounded like in reality (and the
huge advantage of having recording skills on hand means that they can listen to
them over and over again) and will have realised what works and what does
not. They will recognise things which
can be developed on, and things which are best discarded, and while it is in
the nature of the beast that there were far more of the latter than the former,
there were still some very positive things thrown up in the concert which will
warrant further investigation.
It troubles me slightly that every single work aired
in the concert delved into the realms of what we once called the “Avant-Garde” –
the deliberate movement away from the conventions of tonality, rhythm, harmony
and instrumental colour – and strove (often far too hard) to find new ways of
getting sounds from traditional instruments.
Interestingly, while bassoons were clicked, cello spikes played, flutes
overblown, horns rasped and clarinets aired soundlessly, nobody thought to move
away from the convention of pianists sitting at the piano and playing the notes
(whatever happened to that 1950s fad for prepared pianos?). As a result the piano all too often acted as
a millstone around the composers’ necks, dragging their ideas of experimentation
down to the level of the conventional chromatic vocabulary of the piano
keyboard. I did wonder why none of these
young composers felt there was any mileage left in making use of tonal idioms
and conventional instruments; after all, Minimalism was arguably one of the
most successful and popular cults in late 20th-century music, and
that positively celebrated tonality and conventionality of timbre. Perhaps getting anything new and original out
of tonality is asking too much skill and thought from a 21st century
student.
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| How much longer will players trained to deal with graphic scores be able to handle this? |
And with that I realised that there is a yawning chasm between what
our students are being encouraged to do as composers and what the ultimate
consumers of that music – the concert-going public – are exposed to. It has become so wide that I wonder, even, if it stall can be
bridged.
The thought occurred because last night was spent in
the jolly company of some of my former examiner colleagues, presently in
Singapore to examine some of the 60,000 plus children here who, every year, do
their graded exams. Among our party last
night were a few new examiners who were making their maiden examining trips to
Singapore. “It’s wonderful”, one of them
told me. “So much music going on. So many fantastic young players. Classical music is certainly alive and well
here!”
Notwithstanding the argument that 60,000 plus young
people undertaking the ultimately sterile activity of playing three short
pieces, a handful of scales, doing some sight-reading and a few aural tests,
and getting a sole listener to award a largely random mark determined by
factors other than musical ability, is hardly indicative of a healthy musical
climate, it was obvious to me that there is a very fundamental disconnect with
what these examiners hear a couple of dozen times a day, and what the couple of
dozen student composers and performers were doing this afternoon.
I worry deeply about the future of music. I believe that its very ubiquitousness has
devalued musical currency to the point where nobody really notices it any
more. But I worry also that music is
rapidly fragmenting itself, and deliberately shutting itself off from reality. While academic composers try to push
boundaries and go where no musician has ever gone before, the vast mass of
music teachers and their students flock in their droves to the familiar and
predictable. The dread of the old, as
exemplified by today’s students, comes into conflict with the dread of the new,
as shown by the obsession with traditional graded exams, and I do not see any
chance of the two rubbing shoulders even peripherally. The appalling limitations both of the graded
examination syllabus and the new music extremists has set up a barrier which is
pretty near impenetrable.
So long as 21st century trainee composers
deliberately make their music inaccessible by a conscious move away from conventionality
(exemplified by graphic scores which require special skills to interpret) and
the graded exams continue to train musicians as if there have been no developments
since the 19th century, the future of music as a unifying art seems
doomed.
